TechCrunch has reported a leaked slide from a Yahoo internal meeting which intimates the once popular social bookmarking site delicious.com (owned by Yahoo) may be shut down. It’s early days yet, only being a couple of hours since the report appeared on TechCrunch, but the online world is already responding.
At the moment, #delicious is trending on twitter, Australia – not worldwide, which is likely to be a time zone issue. The general reception seems to be “Nooooo!” and an online petition #savedelicious on activist social media tool act.ly has been started. I have signed it immediately, because this is the one tool that has stayed the course throughout my Masters in Information and Knowledge Management, keeping track of information, issues and developements in the libraries and information sciences sector. The silver lining of this cloud is that I can share with you a global live map of all the people who have signed this petition! Social media is marvellous, until they shut it down. However, let’s be circumspect about this, as there is no official communication confirming this from Yahoo.
Obviously, though, people like to be prepared, and there are already alternatives to delicious being passed around, evernote, for example, and zotero are two that come to mind. A list of other alternatives is available here. I’ll be keeping my ears open for more news about this, because this has pretty big ramifactions for not only the daao blog, but also designing research capabilities into the daao. It just goes to show that software / application dependency for collaborative research tools must be addressed, and that future-proofing is built into any strategy.
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Noooooo indeed! Delicious has been the one bookmarking site I’ve stuck with. i currently have 777 tagged bookmarks there!
Let’s hope Yahoo just dumps altavista and other services and leaves our much beloved delicious be. ( insert hopeful face emoticon here!)
Posting to delicious has become an instinctual and integrated part of my research practice. Its hard to changeover ( as we know! ). people become ingrained in their online work practices. Delicious was easy. Zotero is more complex and a slightly bigger commitment to opening up your data. I did read this am that future Zotero will be developing versions that work with browsers other than firefox…
watch this space I suppose..
I know!! Up until now I had been feeling really good about how my usage of delicious has matured and integrated as part of my regular research practice.
The Mod Librarian has posted some worthy comments about the other side of cloud computing, and I really like the direction that the Infornado has taken this in. It’s definintely a good opportunity to talk about data curation.